


Snake, Bitch, Lover

by Syrinx



Series: Chimerical [8]
Category: Thoroughbred
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-09-13
Updated: 2009-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-07 07:29:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrinx/pseuds/Syrinx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hyperbole – obvious and intentional exaggeration</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snake, Bitch, Lover

She has so many choice words for him. Since the moment she meets him they are there, at the tip of her tongue. Rude, stuck-up, _jerk._ They flooded her upon first impression, and since then they’ve only multiplied. Snob. Brat.

Others mask their similar opinions behind maturity, but she doesn’t have that inclination. She can’t distance herself. Can’t say he’s only intense. Focused. _Driven. _Her mother tells her not to jump to conclusions, but she won’t participate in the lie.

.

When she gets to know him better she calls him cruel. He’s heavy-handed, oppressive in the way he pushes his mount. _Wicked. _She stands by with Wonder’s reins in her hands and watches, stricken, at the sight. The chestnut colt plunges, and his smile is lost in the creature’s wind-whipped mane.

.

_Idiot,_ she thinks, when he goes galloping out of the stable yard, the bay gelding already working up a sweat from the fear. Gravel and earth fly up from the animal’s hooves, and they are gone, thundering toward who knows what. Oblivion, maybe. Careless. Fool.

She worries for the horse, but they both come back mainly unscathed. The horse is sweat-stained, and thin lines of red scratch up his arm. She doesn’t look at his face, doesn’t think about it. It isn’t because she may not have words for what she might see.

.

In all the time she’s known him, he’ll never surprise her. Nothing he does will break out of the box she’s fashioned for him, and she has a feeling he knows just what her expectations are. It’s disdain, she thinks. Indifference. She’ll feel slivers of surprise when he gives her that sideways glance, that look like he knows just what she wants from him. Arrogant. _Vain. _

Occasionally, she’ll feel bad for constructing the box in the first place. Her mother always tells her that she wants to see the best in people. This is wrong. In him, she’s only wanted to see the worst.

.

It happens on the day he exemplifies everything she’s ever expected. Impatient, conceited, turbulent, _hot._ It swipes at her from out of nowhere, molds itself out of their bitterness, shocks her to complete silence.

Betrayed.

It should piss her off. She could call him out on it, call him all the other words she’s collected for him in her head. All she can find to shout are the dirty names, the ones she’s never allowed herself to use with anyone, and they careen like a litany through her head. Bastard, asshole,_ fucker. _

He has no right to look at her like that, not when he is so wrong. Not when she finds that she lacks the very ability to say anything in return.

So they stand. Silent.

.

The Belmont is the last straw for him. The last moment he’s going to weather her self-righteous dog and pony show. He has always thought her superior attitude was amusing. So easily poked, prodded. Now he just wants to call her sanctimonious. _Bitch. _

A little part of him glories in the look she gives him after the race. The expression that she wears is one he knows so well, and when it crumbles to pieces he is satisfied. Horrified. He doesn’t know which. She would have a choice word for this moment, he thinks. If only she would say anything at all.

.

Afterward he wants to be ruthless, the cutthroat she sees. He takes her aside, and her eyes flash warnings he’s been ignoring for years.

“We own this horse together, Ashleigh. Fifty-fifty.”

“Not with you,” she says.

“Townsend Acres is me.” He rolls his eyes, because this has always been such a fight. Mincing words is what she’s good at. Constructing a fantasy world all for her benefit. Deluded._ Liar. _

“You can sway your father to your opinions,” she says. “You can’t do the same to me.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not what I was getting at.”

“It’s where we would have wound up,” she says flatly, turning away.

.

He doesn’t like admitting that she’s right. She’s so often right. Perfect. _Virtuous_. Even when he knows it’s not really the case. It makes him want to rip her down, so others can see the flaws.

It would be a waste of time.

No one sees the mars on her but him.

.

The next race is a disaster. The race after that is somehow worse. She stands next to him in the morning and worries her bottom lip between her teeth, keeps a hard grip on everything. The rail. The clipboard. If she had nothing to hold onto he thinks she’d snag his wrist in her hands and squeeze.

But that’s her. His personal misanthrope. Downer. _Killjoy. _

She expects the worst, and so it’s what she’s always gotten from him. And now he knows she feels guilty about it, knows that this is why she hovers nearby, words she can’t form always stuck in her throat. It makes it all the worse.

The colt knows. They scratch the next race, and it’s not a relief.

.

“I think I should take him to Whitebrook.” It’s a statement with a dull edge. She’s been thinking about it for a while, so much so that it’s worn away the nerves that are her second nature.

“No.” It’s just as blunt.

She looks almost wounded. Like she expected something else.

.

Theirs is a tenuous balance, and it slowly slips all to hell. Their business partnership is commonly misconceived, twisted. His friends smirk at her from afar, implore him to fuck her and just get it over with. She bottles it all up so tightly no one she knows could possibly confuse her relationship with him for anything other than forced. Hatred. Easy as pie. He almost envies her for it.

Spite. Denial. Hunger. Heart. _Lust._

Even with the suggestions falling off of ignorant lips, it hits him one day like a brick. It’s only infatuation, he tells himself. But then she looks at him too long one day.

It actually pisses him off that she would look at him, just this once, like she has something on her mind that he can so easily guess. That she can have a ready, sensible protest if he bothered to call her on it.

_Fuck this,_ he thinks.

“What?” he barks at her, and she jumps. Guilt washes over her in waves.

Nothing makes sense.

.

So it is one day that he’s had enough. It is the one day she lets her guard down. She lets herself stop, finally. They’re worn, spent, _consumed_.

It’s dark. It would be dark, impossible to see or be seen. The training barn sits quietly around them, cavernous on the night following another of their public disasters. Her heart is beating like a crazed thing, trapped in her chest. And there’s no way he can feel anything other than the slow burn of every point of his body that touches hers.

Fingertips, mouth, tongue. She leans into him and arches back, his hands in her tangled hair.

.

It’s true what they say, but neither is stupid enough to call it a mistake.

So it’s only a matter of time before it happens again. Wherever, whenever. It’s only a matter of time before they start saying stupid, lovely shit, murmured against their skin. Things they can use against each other later, if they have to.

Angelic, beautiful, teasing words.

She shuts her eyes, smiles at the feel of him.

.

They’re also not stupid enough to call it forever. Sometimes she forgets that. He never does. Pragmatist. Stargazer. There is no middle ground.

.

_“Extraordinary,”_ he whispers, and she lets out a breath.

The colt crosses the finish line.


End file.
